Paper uses florescent additives that reflect blue light into your eyes.

.....................

moonpie

FYI, as someone who is not an alt (as you can tell by my substantial history contributing to the forum and my distinct posting style), i will say that i agree with what Light's post is saying here. i think other regulars on the forum will likely agree too

i do concede that i also feel your frustration with many members on this forum focusing on the wrong or off-topic issues, frequent lack of evidence and way too many anecdotes, and a general lack of progress on doing anything technical about the issue

(i agree with you that i'm also tired of the fact that people here seem to not want to do seemingly obvious, methodical tests such as capturing a good and bad device with a lossless capture card and directly comparing the pixels — especially with how long this forum has been around)

however, i also feel like a lot of your contributions here have not really done anything to improve this, and frequently have the effect of derailing threads.

although some of the information you've posted here has been helpful contributions, such as that sine wave PWM is much more comfortable than other types (which I agree with)…

most of your replies, I feel at this point, simply are not productive for this forum and do come across as very nit-picky or unnecessarily targeting specific topics or forum members

i get that there are a lot of threads here that are frustratingly off-topic, i feel just as annoyed when i log onto this forum and see something like "changing my wifi router caused eye strain" with really vague reasoning, not even providing e.g. an up-close video of the screen

however, i still feel like the most productive move here would not be to outright dismiss the thread entirely as it not only discourages new members but makes the forum feel a lot more stressful to post on for many of us in general.

if you look at how i've been replying to these types of threads, i feel like i'm more on the right track —

for example, instead of completely shutting down this off-topic thread on "i get strain reading on paper", i try to help them better connect what they feel to what actually is the more likely source of their issue, and point out details they may not know yet —

"At points in my life I've felt a similar way, but I realized it was due to how bad screens have affected my habits in how I focus and move my eyes, even after using the screen.

Turns out: I don't think there is any problem with paper itself. But, my ability to read on paper did actually significantly improve after I found better LCDs and started using them for extended amounts of time.

I feel by taking advantage of my experience with LCDs screens having residual effects on my vision, using that in a "positive way" like this, it helped me a lot in getting re-acquainted with focusing my eyes "correctly".

I would suggest that instead of avoiding trying LCDs entirely for fear of them causing flare-ups — start with some really simple, primitive ones that are much more likely to be comfortable, like old game consoles… which I don't think you (Jordan) have tried before.

If you find something comfy like this, see if it ends up influencing your habits of focusing on other things like paper too. That's what I did a few years ago, and it actually worked pretty well for me."

this is essentially what I did here, and i feel like it much more effectively directs the thread away from the off-topic or "too broad" idea — towards a direction which is a lot more productive for this forum (trying a type of screen someone hasn't tried before) — without de-railing the thread in its entirety.

-

i would really appreciate it if you take a step back for a moment and carefully consider my feedback here — it would really mean a lot to both me and the future of this forum in general. thank you

reaganry Was it indoors? I've found that lighting with low color rendering (i.e. most LEDs and flourescents) makes blue often look offputting/blurry/rather drab to me.

However, in sunlight, better quality LEDs with higher color rendering, or other types of light bulbs, I noticed that blue looks really different and doesn't distract me. In fact blue objects actually look pretty aesthetically pleasing to me in that case.

reaganry can you replicate your success with the Pi in desktop linux? why/why not do you think?

alright, so:

1. Pi graphics stack is very unique, so unfortunately can't be reproduced on a conventional PC.

2. BUT, I've actually made my first progress towards strain-free PC Linux very recently. There is a long way to go before this is actually a reliable option, but I've found something that very likely contains the key we're looking for (at least for unaccelerated Intel graphics). Interestingly, I don't think the problem is dithering… What now needs to be done is to find the exact steps to reproduce it.

here's the details.

Pi graphics

reproducing what the Pi 1 can do directly isn't really possible, since it uses an entirely unconventional graphics stack and GPU (broadcom VideoCore, which splits the GPU into 2 separate components, one that provides OpenGL acceleration which can be disabled, and one called "hardware video scaler" that scales the framebuffer to fit the screen and applies optional antialiasing -- this HVS can also either be run in "online scaling" accelerated or "offline" unaccelerated mode, where the offline mode is noticeably more comfortable.)

what's really interesting about the Pi 1 (mine is Model B, early revision with "©2011"-only copyright date) is that my current setup on it is actually -EVEN better- in comfort for me by a significant amount, compared to the typically-well-regarded older Windows versions like 1511 or 8.1 (at least when it's connected to a known-good monitor like Sharp LC-G5C26U).

using this setup actually made me notice an oversharpening/edge-enhancement-like effect Windows seems to add in addition, at the OS level, on top of whatever the graphics card does, that I didn't catch before -- even on older Windows versions with Basic Display Driver on older graphics like HD Graphics 4000!! -- and this is not present on the Pi 1.

(I was VNCing from the Pi into the same Windows PC I previously tried with the same monitor, so I noticed this by directly comparing what "should be" the same Windows app interfaces/text rendering/color schemes -- but they appeared visibly different and more comfortable to me through the Pi's output.)

what's also unique is how much customization is possible, it is very easy to do things like ignore the EDID entirely (which is what i'm doing, since my Sharp display stubbornly doesn't expose it's native 1366x768 DVI mode in its default EDID but supports it otherwise), force a custom EDID, disable the scaling filter to get "crisp" 200% scaled resolutions, custom resolutions or timings, etc.

note that the latest versions of Pi OS have switched to yet another graphics driver called "kernel mode setting" which initalizes the VideoCore chip in a very different way, seems less comfortable, and doesn't provide the extensive customization of the older driver at all! Fortunately Raspberry Pi still maintains a "legacy compatible" variant of the OS, which maintains the original "dispmanx firmware driver" which is what I'm using.

-

My first ever progress towards strain-free Linux on PCs

however, in terms of my progress on Linux, I actually do have a significant lead for standard PCs. recently I was trying a bunch of distros. although 90% of them caused strain even in non-GPU-accelerated mode, i eventually stumbled across something very different.

there's this obscure, very minimal distro that runs of a USB I found called 4MLinux. very barebones, has a GUI but doesn't even have any package manager or UEFI boot support. (it seems to be someone's personal distro.)

although i'm certainly not recommending using this obscure OS, there is something -VERY- unique about it presents the most significant progress I think we've made for Linux strain yet (at least on Intel Graphics)

at boot you choose between Intel driver or VESA driver. Intel driver has tons of strain, did not like using that mode at all, worse than Windows.

BUT in the VESA mode, I literally achieved the most comfortable strain-free image I've EVER seen on my AUO TN laptop panel (which was already a "decent enough" screen I could be productive on, but this feels a whole new level).

Managed to coax RealVNC into running off this OS's live USB and it felt SO calm, very different than the Basic Display Adapter Windows output I'm used to on the laptop). Very comparable to the Pi 1's output, even though it's on a UHD 620 PC with an eDP panel.

Interestingly it still has spatial dithering (same as Windows on this laptop, both OSes don't use temporal on this hardware) but the difference is still apparent, better than Windows with or without spatial dithering. IMO this rules out dithering as my main issue!

So this got me thinking, is it JUST the VESA driver that's the key? Actually, NO… I tried another Linux distro that offers a basic VESA driver at boot (CrunchBang++). Although it was better than some Linux distros, I actually still got strain. The image felt different and a lot harsher compared to whatever 4MLinux is doing.

So, I actually have a real, concrete goal for the first time. Figure out how to precisely set up a mainstream & reliable distro that offers a barebones option -- like Debian or Arch -- to load the exact same graphics stack 4M is using. And get it to look the exact same as 4M with VESA for me on my laptop panel.

Although this arguably won't have graphics acceleration, if I succeed in doing this, it might be the first time we ever make substantial progress here towards a strain-free option for Linux (AKA good enough for "very sensitive" users who currently don't like using Linux at all).

I will start experimenting with this when I'm more free later this month. If I make any progress towards this, I will definitely post about it